Eastbayri.com

Even for a company accustomed to building things for stressful work in harsh conditions, the task assigned one recent shipment is extreme.

Bristol’s GMT Composites was hired to build the carbon fiber support tubes for a Keck Array “telescope” that recently began watching the cosmos from the South Pole.

The Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had high expectations for these tubes.

They needed to be strong enough to hold heavy mirrors in the wildest of weather without budging. Winds can be strong there but it’s the cold that really stands out — average temperature is minus 57 degrees, the record low is minus 117 degrees, and the record high is plus 7.5 degrees. Months pass without sunshine.

They needed to be precise, down to tolerances of five-thousands of an inch.

And they needed to be light.

“When you are flying everything in by plane, weight matters a lot,” said GMT’s Jonathan Craig.

GMT got its start and is best known building carbons spars, rudders and other parts for high-end sailboats but the company supplies carbon parts for all manner of uses, many of them one of a kind.

“We are used to working in tight tolerances,” he said. GMT also makes “pallets” used in measuring silicon wafers for semi-conductors with tolerances down to 0.0002 of an inch (20 times thinner than a human hair). Still, this was an especially tall order for such big structural pieces.

Particularly critical was the need to create carbon parts that could resist expanding and contracting through wild temperature swings and that could avoid becoming at all brittle in temperatures that can cause steel to snap.

“The challenge was formulating just the right resin,” Mr. Craig said.

GMT apparently did its work well. The Keck Array has been up for some months now and the Bristol firm recently heard this from the customers:

“Your CF tubes worked out exactly as we had hoped in our telescopes’ beam-mapping mirror support structure at the South Pole ... Thanks for all your help, including your expert advice and flexibility in developing the order. This was a very challenging and unusual application. I feel that the end result confirms that we got the design and execution just right.”

Mr. Craig said such praise means a lot coming from the likes of scientists at Harvard, Cal Tech, the Smithsonian and other project partners.

“As much as we enjoy building carbon composite structures, the real rewards come when you hear back from your customers, whether for a carbon mast or a part of a Keck Array, how happy they are with the finished product.”

The Keck Array “is definitely not your typical stargazer” Mr. Craig said.

Not the sort that you look through, this one (named after the foundation that provided the millions in funding) analyzes radiation left over from “the primeval fireball that filled the early universe,” say the developers. “Now cooled from visible light to faint microwaves, this primordial radiation still fills the universe as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), first detected in 1965 ... Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that such a violent space-time disturbance would have generated strong gravitational waves that would persist to this day.”

“We may be able to probe the very moment at which the universe sprang into existence and explore energies far higher than will ever be achieved in terrestrial accelerators,” said Cal Tech’s Andrew Lange.

RWU, URI, Brown rank high

Local college sailing teams remain among the nation’s best, according to the latest Sailing World college rankings.

Roger Williams University is fourth and Brown University seventh in the national coed dinghy poll.

And in the women’s poll, Connecticut College is second, URI third, Brown fourth and Roger Williams 15th. Yale led both polls.

Charter Yacht Show

The Newport Charter Yacht Show (NCYS), showcasing yachts from 80 feet to super yacht sizes, has been acquired by the Newport Harbor Corporation. Yachts from around the globe will visit the Newport Yachting Center and elsewhere on the Newport Harbor waterfront from June 18-22, 2012. 

The five-day show has been in existence for 30 years and is one of only a handful of significant charter yacht shows held around the world.

Timing is good since the show will be staged while the world is focusing on Newport as the venue for the last installment of the America’s Cup World Series 2012 (June 23 through July 1).

Container crashes

The latest nautical hazard? Floating containers spilled from cargo ships.

A few weeks ago the boat of a French racing sailor hit one in the mid-Atlantic and sank. More recently, six South African sailors were rescued after their yacht hit one and sank off Mozambique.

Estimates are that between 2,000 and 10,000 of the truck-sized metal containers go overboard every year — a bunch of them fell of a Buzzards Bay barge in the 1990s with the result that Little Compton beaches were suddenly covered with teddy bears and sneakers.

The industry says the hazard is slight because the containers sink; photos of floating containers indicate otherwise.